She is taken, completely.
Enjoy reading
* * * * * * * * * *
It had been a while since she’d had a good coffee. Strong, rich, bittersweet, and oh so bad for you. Like love, she thought, rather cynically. Emma was not a fan of love at that moment.
It had been two years, maybe three, since Kit had gotten married. His wife Mary was expecting their first child. Everyone had been invited to their mansion up in the country area of England for a house party that was to last ostensibly for over a month. Ridiculous extravagance, Emma thought, but then Kit Brandeworth was an enormously wealthy man and could afford to be extravagant. Emma had inevitably been one of those invited – her family and Kit’s had been lifelong friends, and though it had been a long time since Emma had last visited her family home up where Kit’s was, she was still a part of them and thus it would have been an unpardonable insult not to invite her. And while no one would have been surprised had she politely declined the invitation, she was not about to run away and hide like some snivelling coward and lick her wounds. No, she was better than that. She would show them that she had not been hurt, that Kit’s betrayal had not cut her straight through her heart… that she had not crumpled up and died.
And so, here she was, on the morning that the guests were to arrive, drinking her fifth fortifying cup of straight black coffee. She looked up as a thundering noise on the stairs indicated that her brother had come down. She smiled blearily at him. “Ready to go, Jordan?” she asked with false cheer, hoping he didn’t notice her bloodshot eyes or shaking hands.
Jordan regarded his sister for a moment, taking in the lackluster hue of her beautiful black hair, the redness of her usually bright sapphire blue eyes. She’d lost the plumpness he remembered she’d had at her vulnerable age of nineteen, and while her new slenderness undoubtedly suited her, she looked small and fragile, and ever so vulnerable. He felt a stab of rage at the man who’d left her at the altar, humiliated her, and broken her heart in front of the world, but quelled it quickly when he saw how weary she was. It would not do to cause a scene and besmirch her name further in any scandal – she would not be able to bear it. He forced a smile onto his face. “Shall we use my car or yours?”
They were all here, she thought, and wanted to cry. Every single one of them who had been at her wedding, who had watched her wait, and wait in vain, and then cry, and flee from the church once she had finally accepted that Kit was simply not going to come. And then they had all subsequently gone to Kit’s wedding, to watch him marry his chosen bride, the woman he loved, the woman he had always loved, and who had not been her.
She had wondered, sometimes, if Kit had ever felt any love, any tenderness for her at all. She had wondered during her engagement to him, and she had wondered after it had been broken. There had been times, when they were alone, and he had shown such love, such affection, she could have been in no doubt of his feelings. And yet, almost as soon as he saw her again, the next day or so, he would be like a polite stranger once again, dutiful, courteous, but distant. She had never understood it… even after the truth had come out and he had revealed his pining for Mary, his childhood sweetheart.
“Emma.” For a moment, she thought it was Kit coming towards her, and wanted to run. Then she realised that the hair was wrong, the expression was wrong, even the stance was wrong. It wasn’t Kit – it was James, his twin. James, with the same sculpted body, the same wide, broad chest and expansive shoulders, same muscular thighs and legs and rippling arms. She smiled faintly. James. She’d never liked him, and was quite certain her sentiments were returned, yet he had been strangely, her only support throughout her engagement with Kit – he’d been the one ally she had seemed to have within the walls of the wealthy, cold, and hauty Brandeworth family. The lesser of two evils, so to speak. The Brandeworths had all hated her – but he’d hated her the least. He’d cut his hair short sometime in the duration that she had not seen him – Kit wore his dark locks fashionably long and tied back in a que. James had lopped them off, and brushed them back of his forehead. His hooded, glittering green eyes were laughing mockingly as ever, the sensuous curve of his lips as sardonic as she remembered. His face was his brother’s, and yet it was not.
It was not just the superficial differences, but those engraved onto the planes of his face. Kit had always been sober, pleasant, dutiful. James, the older of the two was wry, cynical, always slightly mocking and a touch arrogant. Both were charming. Both were wealthy. But both were so very different.
“It has been a while.” His voice was distant, cultured, with a touch of hauteur.
She nodded. “It has. Are you well?”
“I am very well. And you?” he regarded her new slenderness with a frown. “You have lost weight, I see.”
“And glad of it,” Emma quipped.
“I am not,” he said abruptly. “You were perfect the way you were.”
There was an awkward silence for a moment, and then Kit strode into the room, Mary on his arm, and announced that lunch was ready.
After lunch, Emma found her way out to the old river, where she and Kit had used to sit, talk, and kiss sometimes. She sat for a while, lost in memories, and realised all of a sudden that while she was sad, and certainly mourned the days she had lost following a pointless dream, she was no longer bitter about Kit’s betrayal. In a way, the only reason she had felt so hurt was that he could have been so careless as to humiliate her in front of so many. She knew that if she had married him, she would not have been able to love him for the rest of her life. It was that simple – she had been in love with him for a short time, perhaps, but she would not have been able to love him for life. If she were, she would still assuredly be in love with him, and she was not. No, she was most definitely not.
She consigned her love, and her hurt, to the past. It had happened. It was over. She was still alive. She would heal, completely, given time, and one day she would love again. There was no use fighting against what had happened. Better to accept it with good grace… and save her pride, in the meantime. It would always hurt, perhaps, but it did not hurt quite so much anylonger.
“A penny for your thoughts?” a deep, masculine voice interrupted them.
Emma laughed. It was a strangely light, relieved sound. She felt no reticence at all towards him, strangely enough. “It will cost you a million pennies for these thoughts,” she remarked.
James smiled. “That profound, are they?”
“I was contemplating divinity and infinity.”
“Again? Do you never tire of it?”
“Never,” Emma smiled back at him. “How can one ever tire of it? It is a concept as such that the human mind can never grasp. It makes one’s mind want to fold in on itself, simply trying to understand.”
“That’s what makes it so tiring,” James said wryly. “One becomes weary of one’s mind being folded in on itself over time. Its dreadfully difficult trying to straighten it out once again.”
Emma laughed, and James stared at her for a minute, transfixed by the light in her eyes, the lushness of her parted lips. He had never seen her so carefree, so happy. Her only warning was the strange gleam in his glittering eyes before he kissed her.
His mouth was pressed, hard, against her own. Startled into immobility, and more than a little fascinated, she stilled. His tongue slipped out from between his lips, and slowly, languidly, licked over hers, finally slipping to the seam of her mouth. Her mouth opened, and he slid inside, tasting her. His tongue curled around hers, stroking it, enticing it, until he had lured her inside his mouth, where he trapped it, and sucked it lazily.
She gasped, pulled away. There was something curiously familiar about his kisses – no, terrifyingly so.
They were Kit’s kisses.
During dinner, Emma, seated next to James, could hardly bear to look at him. Her newfound relief gone, she found in place of them, suddenly a million complications and problems. Wonderful, she thought to herself. Well done, Emma. Trade one twin for the other, so he break your heart again. Heck, it would have been bad enough if they were simply brothers, but twins? My god, she’d be seeing Kit’s face for the rest of her life!
“Could you pass the salt, please?”
Emma looked up. The salt was directly in front of them, a mere foot away from him. “Get it yourself!” she snapped, uncharacteristically rudely, then felt ashamed almost at once.
“My apologies,” James said smoothly. “I merely wished to distract you from your thoughts. They seem to be rather distressing.”
His kisses were just like Kit’s. But of course – they had the same lips, didn’t they? Perhaps they kissed exactly alike. But even as she made the excuses, she knew they were feeble. Men did not kiss alike. To find, and kiss two that did was almost impossible. “How would you know?” she said waspishly. “You cannot read my thoughts.”
His raised brow made her think that he could.
“You have been quiet all evening. Is there perhaps something wrong?”
“No,” she almost snarled.
He smiled slightly. “Ah – is it perhaps that time of the month?”
He thought she had PMS! She wanted to scream. “No!” she said furiously. “Not that its any of your business. But since you seem so eager to talk about my menstruation cycle, I’ll take leave to inform you that I’m not due for another three weeks.”
There was a faint curve to his lips that she knew were signs of mockery. “But perhaps you are irregular? It has been shown that some women who have to face intense emotional distress do become irregular, if only for the duration of that distress. An influx of hormones, I believe is toted as the cause.”
“I am not irregular!” she hissed, and because she knew that any more of conversation in this vein would cause her to tip the entire contents of the dining table on his lap she turned resolutely to her soup and pointedly ignored him for the rest of the evening.
It was dark out, but Emma was resolute. She needed a walk, and by god, she was going to take one. She had to think. She had to relieve the stress that was building up inside her.